Scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have discovered previously unknown volcanoes in the ocean waters around the remote South Sandwich Islands.

Using ship-borne sea-floor mapping technology during research cruises onboard the RRS James Clark Ross, the scientists found 12 volcanoes beneath the sea surface -- some up to 3km high. They found 5km diameter craters left by collapsing volcanoes and 7 active volcanoes visible above the sea as a chain of islands.

The research is important also for understanding what happens when volcanoes erupt or collapse underwater and their potential for creating serious hazards such as tsunamis. Also this sub-sea landscape, with its waters warmed by volcanic activity creates a rich habitat for many species of wildlife and adds valuable new insight about life on earth.

Cows have best friends and become stressed if they are separated, according to a scientist.

Krista McLennan, who made the discovery while working on her PhD at Northampton University, believes her findings could help improve milk yields.

The 27-year-old measured the heart rates and cortisol levels of cows to see how they cope when isolated.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft is closing in on Vesta, and from now until the ion-powered spacecraft goes into orbit in mid-July, every picture of the giant asteroid will be the best one ever taken. What will researchers do with this unprecedented clarity?

"For starters," says Dawn chief engineer Marc Rayman, "we're going to look for an asteroid moon."

You might think of asteroids as isolated bodies tumbling alone through space, but it's entirely possible for these old "loners" to have companions. Indeed, 19-mile-wide Ida, 90-mile-wide Pulcova, 103-mile-wide Kalliope, and 135-mile-wide Eugenia each have a moon. And 175-mile-wide Sylvia has two moons. Measuring 330 miles across, Vesta is much larger than these other examples, so a "Vesta moon" is entirely possible.

Where do such moons come from?

Rayman suggests one source: "When another large body collides with an asteroid, the resulting debris is sprayed into orbit around the asteroid and can gradually collapse to form a moon."

Larry Agenbroad, the principal investigator and site director of the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs announced that Earthwatch volunteers uncovered the site's 119th tusk on Wednesday. That discovery is the first tusk of the 60th mammoth at the site. Fifty-seven are Columbian mammoths and three are woolly.

The Earthwatch volunteers and Agenbroad's staff will be excavating new areas, looking for more mammoths and other species of animals that became trapped and died in the sinkhole death trap 26,000 years ago. In addition to mammoths, the site has yielded 85 other species of animals and plants as well as several unidentified insects.

The laboratory is open for viewing by the visiting public. Visitors can see into the laboratory and view the work being conducted there.

Manila, Philippines - Neptune will appear in the sky as a faint light early Tuesday as the planet completes its orbit around the sun for the first time since its discovery in 1846, according to a bulletin of the government-run weather bureau.

But the rainy weather is expected to cast gloom over the sky show, which is supposed to be the first time the planet could be viewed in Earth's sky.

The observatory of the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa) said people would unlikely to see Neptune's rendezvous with the Aquarius and Pisces constellations at 1 a.m. on Tuesday.

Even in clear skies, however, Neptune's apparition could only be viewed via telescope and could not be seen with the naked eye because of its slight sparkle.

Lufthansa and the Jülich Research Centre ( FZJ ) will today launch an innovative climate research project for the long-term observation of the Earth's atmosphere using scheduled Lufthansa services. The specially developed measurement devices on board the Lufthansa Airbus A340-300 Viersen will routinely record atmospheric trace substances, and in the future, aerosols and cloud particles as well, while in flight. This shall occur all over the world and on a broad basis. The generated data will be digitally sampled, processed and analysed after every landing. The goal is the creation of a worldwide measurement infrastructure that would allow the global observation of the Earth's atmosphere by means of civil aviation. This gathered data will be of major importance for climate research and numerical weather forecasting. The first flight will start in Frankfurt today at 12.30 p.m. to Lagos in Nigeria.

A several-year development phase involving 15 European project partners under the direction of the Jülich Research Centre ( FZJ ) has gone into the preparation of the research project named IAGOS ( In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System ). The newly-developed instrument package is extremely robust, almost maintenance-free and can be efficiently integrated into an airline's flight operations. The use of civil aviation aircraft allows for the collection of large quantities of important measurement data, in a volume and resolution that would otherwise not be possible using only research flights or satellites.

Astronomers will celebrate a remarkable event on 11 July. It will be exactly one year since the planet Neptune was discovered. Readers should note a caveat, however. That year is a Neptunian one. The great icy world was first pinpointed 164.79 years ago - on 23 September 1846. And as Neptune takes 164.79 Earthly years to circle the sun, it is only now completing its first full orbit since its detection by humans. Hence those anniversary celebrations.

And there is much to commemorate - for Neptune's discovery marked a turning point in astronomy. Its existence was revealed, not through a serendipitous observation by an astronomer but by the careful work of mathematicians. They calculated that perturbations in the orbit of Uranus, then thought to be the sun's most distant planet, could only be explained by the existence of another, even remoter world whose gravity was affecting Uranus's path.

Oy! Where to start?

It seems there is a veritable fever going around at the moment, all centered on Comet C/2010 X1 (Elenin) and the possible connection it may have to Nibiru - or Planet-X as it's known in some circles. This is the supposed "12th planet" that's been prophesied to come plowing through the Solar System causing a doomsday scenario for us earth-dwellers. Right now, YouTube is awash with videos on Comet Elenin, making this and that claim. Last I checked, a search for "Comet Elenin" returned over 5,000 results on YouTube alone (and that says nothing about what's going on in the blogosphere).

As we've noted here on SOTT over the years, when the noise starts to overpower the signal, that's when there's usually something brewing behind the scenes. The Powers That Be don't just put resources into obscuring certain topics for nothing; and it seems that their disinfo machine is cranked into high gear for this one. Due to all this noise surrounding these topics many questions abound: Is there something special about Comet Elenin? Does Elenin have anything to do with Nibiru/Planet-X? Is Elenin related to the chaotic weather we've experienced lately? Is Comet Elenin really a spaceship from another galaxy? Is all of this somehow related to the end of the Mayan Calendar and the 2012 doomsday prophecies? These questions are understandable given all the lies we're swimming in and the frantic nature of the material we're dealing with. Hopefully a lot of these questions will clear up towards the end of this article.

To summarize the situation, it seems that we have certain folks claiming that Comet Elenin is everything from an elaborate hoax, to a piloted alien spacecraft, to a stray neutron star, to Planet-X itself, and on and on... All the while, NASA and friends seem to be sitting back comfortably in their chairs saying, "nothing to see here, folks!" So who's figured it out? Or hasn't anyone really put all the pieces together yet? Clearly, there's a lot of truth being mixed with lies - that is for certain. The hope here is to dissect some of the noise and inject a little sanity into what is otherwise an insane discussion.

Buried deep beneath the sediment of the North Atlantic Ocean lies an ancient, lost landscape with furrows cut by rivers and peaks that once belonged to mountains. Geologists recently discovered this roughly 56-million-year-old landscape using data gathered for oil companies.

"It looks for all the world like a map of a bit of a country onshore," said Nicky White, the senior researcher. "It is like an ancient fossil landscape preserved 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) beneath the seabed."

So far, the data have revealed a landscape about 3,861 square miles (10,000 square km) west of the Orkney-Shetland Islands that stretched above sea level by almost as much as 0.6 miles (1 km). White and colleagues suspect it is part of a larger region that merged with what is now Scotland and may have extended toward Norway in a hot, prehuman world.

AgResearch's genetically engineered (GE) goat experiments have a new bizarre twist with surviving GE pregnancies producing mostly transgender offspring, that AgResearch staff term 'goys,' according to the Soil & Health Association of NZ.

An AgResearch farm manager recently revealed to Soil & Health and GE Free NZ, during a tour of its Ruakura GE animal field trial site, that most of the GE goats produced were transgender. It appeared that about 75% were "goys" with the remainder female.

"The "goys", females in sterile male bodies, are to be induced into milking to ascertain whether the intended genetically engineered (GE) human protein will be expressed in the milk," said Soil & Health - Organic NZ spokesperson Steffan Browning.

Previous GE cattle pregnancies have only 5% success, with the goats reported to have a success rate of possibly 15%, although one flock of about 18 recipient does failed to hold one GE embryo of a particular experiment. AgResearch has a track record of resultant GE offspring prone to a variety of disabilities including arthritis, respiratory distress, deformities and ruptured ovaries.(1)

"The 15 "goys" we saw had four true sisters, with one induced to milking at six months following AgResearch's in-house ethics committee approval."(2)